Risk of WiFi Zones

Pub 'fined £8k' for Wi-Fi copyright infringement

A pub owner has been fined £8,000 because someone unlawfully
downloaded copyrighted material over their open Wi-Fi hotspot,
according to the managing director of hotspot provider The Cloud.

Graham
Cove told ZDNet UK on Friday he believes the case to be the first of
its kind in the UK.

Cove
would say only that the fine had been levied in a civil case, brought
about by a rights holder, "sometime this summer".

The law surrounding open Wi-Fi networks and the liability of those running them is a grey area.

According
to internet law professor Lilian Edwards, of Sheffield Law School,
where a business operates an open Wi-Fi spot to give customers or
visitors internet access, they would be "not be responsible in theory"
for users' unlawful downloads, under "existing substantive copyright
law".

She also said the measures that would be brought in under the Digital Economy Bill
— measures that could include disconnection of the account holder —
would not apply because the business could be classified as a public
communications service provider, which would make it exempt. According
to the terms of the bill, only "subscribers" can be targeted with
sanctions.

According
to legal advice, "Wi-Fi hotspots in public and enterprise environments
providing access to the internet to members of the public, free or
paid, are public communications services".

A public communications service provider must, under the terms of the Data Retention Regulations that came into force in the UK in April of this year,
retain records for 12 months on communications that have taken place
over their network. This data includes user IDs, the times and dates of
access, and the online destinations that were being accessed. The
content of the communications cannot be retained without the user's
permission, due to data-protection laws.

However,
there is a get-out clause in the Data Retention Regulations, in that no
public communications service provider has to keep such records unless
they are notified by the government that they are required to do so.

According
to Edwards, this is because "only the big six ISPs have the facilities
to comply, and because the government agreed [in its legislation] to
repay some of the costs [of retaining such records]". She noted that
this clause might itself be non-compliant with the EU data-retention
laws that were transposed into UK law in April.

Edwards
pointed out that, even if the sanctions proposed in the Digital Economy
Bill come into force, "no-one will know who [the downloader] was,
because the IP address that will show up [upon investigation] will be
of the hotspot". She added that the rights holder seeking infringers of
their copyright would probably not know that the IP address in question
was not that of a subscriber.

It would then be up to
the hotspot operator to point out that they were not the end user
downloading copyrighted material. "But when would they get to say that?
Maybe straightaway, maybe not until after disconnection — it's not
currently clear," Edwards said.